Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

He was as bad as me when it came to drinking. One time, he was so out of his shitter at Los Angeles airport that he missed his flight, so we had to send one of the roadies to pick him up. The roadie just grabbed him by the back of his trousers and threw him into the luggage compartment under the tour bus.

Then this woman came running over and shouted, ‘Hey, I saw what you did to that poor little man! You can’t treat him like that!’

The roadie just looked at her and said, ‘Fuck off. He’s our midget.’

Then this little head poked out from between the suitcases and went, ‘Yeah, fuck off, I’m his midget.’

When the tour started at the end of 1981, I was a wreck. I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family. Then the fights between me and Sharon started to get even crazier than before. I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me. Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs—you name it, it would all come flying across the room. I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target. I gave her a black eye once and I thought her dad was gonna rip me into pieces. But he just said, ‘Watch yourself.’ It’s shameful, what I did when I was loaded. The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a fucking atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me. I don’t know why Sharon stuck around, to be honest with you.

Sometimes she’d wake up in the morning and I’d be gone, ’cos I’d hitchhiked back to Bulrush Cottage. But every time I got home, Thelma would tell me to fuck off. That went on for weeks. It was fucking me up, fucking up the kids, fucking up Thelma.

And I can only imagine what it was doing to Sharon.

It took me a long, long time to get over the break-up with Thelma. It tore me apart. I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said, “ bon voyage ”. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.’

But eventually my little trips to Bulrush Cottage ended. The last time I went there it was pissing it down with rain and already getting dark. As soon as I walked through the gate, this heavy-set bloke popped out of nowhere and said, ‘Oi, where d’you think you’re going, eh?’

‘This is my house,’ I told him.

The bloke shook his head. ‘No it ain’t. This is your ex-wife’s house. And you’re not allowed within fifty yards of it. Court order. If you take one step further, you’re spending the night in jail.’

He must have been a bailiff or something.

From the garden, I could hear Thelma laughing inside the house. She was with her divorce lawyer, I think.

‘Can I at least get some clothes?’ I asked.

‘Wait here.’

Five minutes later, some of my old stage clothes came flying out of the door and landed on the grass. By the time I’d picked them up and stuffed them into a carrier bag they were soaked through. Then the door opened again, and out came my seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear, his head in shreds after the time I opened fire on him with the Benelli. That bear was pretty much the only thing I got out of that divorce, along with the knackered old Merc that the cats had scratched up. Thelma got the house, every last penny I had in the bank, and a weekly allowance. I also wanted to pay for the kids to go to private schools. It was the least I could do.

I felt terribly sorry for myself that night.

Trying to carry a seven-foot bear back to London didn’t exactly make things easier. It wouldn’t fit in the cab with me, so I had to order a second cab, just for the bear. Then I had to leave it propped up against a bus stop on the street outside Sharon’s house on Wimbledon Common while I carried my bags into the hallway. But instead of going back out to get the bear, me and Sharon decided that it would be funnier to put one of her frilly kitchen aprons on it, and then get her friends to come outside and see it. But while we were trying to organise all that, someone nicked the fucking thing. I was heartbroken. I loved that bear.

As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right, although we’ve since become close again. And divorce was a much bigger deal back then.

In LA today, if your marriage breaks up, your wife will marry me, and I’ll marry your ex-wife, and we’ll all have fucking dinner and holidays in Mexico together. That ain’t cool with me. I don’t understand how people can do that. I haven’t seen Thelma for decades.

And, to be honest with you, I think it’s for the best.

By the time we took the Diary of a Madman tour to America, we were experts at midget-hanging. But there were some other problems with the show—like the medieval chain-mail suit I used to wear during a few of the numbers. As soon as I worked up a sweat, it was like being wrapped in razor blades. By the end of the night, I was carved up like a slice of roast beef. We also had a lot of trouble with our stage props. For example, we had these kabuki curtains that dropped down from above the stage in two parts, instead of parting in the middle like normal theatrical curtains do. The curtains would go down halfway through the show, and then when they were pulled up again, this mechanical arm with a giant God-like hand on the end of it would come out from under the drum riser and soar above the audience, with me crouching down in the palm. When the arm was fully extended, flames would shoot out of one of the fingers, and I’d stomp on this pedal by my foot, which would activate a catapult behind me, and about fifty pounds of raw meat would be flung into the audience.

Then I’d stand up and shout, ‘ROCK ’N’ ROLL!’

It was fucking awesome.

But, of course, what can go wrong will go wrong—and pretty much everything went wrong on the second night of the US tour. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena, playing to a crowd of tens of thousands. First the smoke machine went on the blink. It was coughing out so much dry ice that no one could see what the fuck they were doing. Then, for some reason, one of the kabuki curtains wouldn’t come down, so we couldn’t get the giant God-like hand ready for its entrance. I remember standing there in my chain-mail suit, watching as Sharon literally swung from this curtain, trying to get it to fall. ‘Drop, you bastard, drop!’ she was screaming.

Eventually, after a couple of roadies joined in, they got the thing unstuck. But then the mechanical arm for the hand got caught up in the carpet on the floor of the stage and started to pull it from under the giant speaker cabinets behind the band, making them wobble like crazy. ‘TIMBER!’ one of the roadies shouted. For what might have been the longest thirty seconds of all our lives, Sharon, my assistant Tony and a bunch of roadies were wrestling with this carpet, trying to untangle it from the mechanical arm, to stop the whole fucking set collapsing.

Finally the carpet was pulled free, someone gave me a shove from behind, the kabuki curtains went up again, and before I knew it I was crouching down in the hand as it rose into the air, with this ocean of screaming kids below me. By that time I was convinced that something else was going to go wrong. So when the arm was fully extended, I covered my eyes and prepared to get my nuts blown off by the pyro, but the flames shot out of the finger without a problem. I was so relieved I almost wept. Then it was time for the final gimmick, so I stomped on the pedal beside my foot to activate the catapult. But what I didn’t know was that some dip-shit from the stage crew had set the catapult the previous night rather than just before the show, so the elastic had gone all limp. When I pressed the button, it just went phut, and instead of this massive payload of pigs’ bollocks and cows’ entrails flying into the audience, it smacked me at 20 mph in the back of the head. The last thing I remember is screaming